Paradise Lost: A Science Fiction Epic (OOC)

[Wing Chun]

Mmmyes, X is dangerously close to C.

[Zephyr116]

Yeah... I'd say that too.

Anyway, I've got some descriptions in my CSs. It's weird, as a male, trying to describe a woman. Make me feel like a creep >.>

[Wing Chun]

Everyone on the internet is a creep in one way or the other, so don't worry about it; we all worry about things, I worry about being too cliche and not having original ideas.

Name: Julia Ryse
Gender: Female
Date of Birth: 5.20.2092.
Race: Caucasian
Height: 5’7”
Weight: 122lbs
Hair: Dark Brown
Eyes: Hazel
Education: Senior High School
Occupation: N/A

Julia Ryse was born and raised in Minnesota, by David Ryse and Lucy Wordsworth-Ryse. There was nothing interesting or eminent about Julia’s childhood, or young adulthood for that matter; she was just a girl, born on the country-side, who did not excel in any form of art, skill, or knowledge. Julia’s only trademark was benevolence and altruism, a heart of purity, always willing to help and offer sympathy. But, these rare virtues scarcely ever helped her through her education which was ultimately interrupted by her strong urge for humanitarian work. Julia moved to Washington DC, one of the worst cities in the entire country, to work at various homeless shelters as a “Madam of the House”; serving food to the hungry, comforting the addicts, and reading stories to the children. The more she involved herself with people in need, the further away from herself she drifted, never adhering to her true calling slumbering inside of her; her dreams of things that had not yet come to pass.

Years came and went, like trains passing idle travelers awaiting their means of escape, and Julia found herself lost in her own despair for the sake of the declining state of the world. As the world around her grew darker, people more often than ever told Julia how bright she was; how her ardent presence becalmed and blinded those dwelling in the dystopian darkness. She began to work at a local Church, a Church which did not deal with the religious fanatics that caused chaos and disorder, a voluntary position which she holds to this day. Julia is not particularly religious herself, she believes in a higher power, but if that higher power can be called “God” or “Jesus” she has no opinion about. Just as the shelters, Julia offers a sympathetic shoulder to cry on at the Church; she hears confessions even though she is not a priest, she offers advice to those that come there in despair, and she is there to offer intimacy, warmth, and friendship to all whom wish it.

The last years leading up to the present, a peculiar man has visited the Church at regular intervals, speaking with Julia about all sorts of things, ranging from existential questions about life, family, purpose, to moral dilemmas. Julia has given him a myriad of advice on the concept of “right & wrong”, ethics in the face of pure injustice; many a times Julia has suspected that this man was and is a resistance leader, but she has never be able to fully prove it; it’s a hunch. Following these sets of events, two additional men of the same kind of spiritual signature came to see Julia, speaking of similar things as the first man. Having sworn professional secrecy, an oath of silence, she could never speak of these matters with anyone, nor would she be able to; Julia was the one people spoke with about their troubles, never could anyone imagine Julia having her own problems.

The last couple of years the word on the street has been that Julia, in fact, is the indirect leader of the Free People’s Resistance, a network of organized forces in Washington DC fighting the city’s leadership. There are three cells operating in the city, three men who consult Julia about their troubles; and more often than Julia would like to, she can see the effects of her consul on the broadcasting news around the city when another attack against the “government” has been made. However, whenever this is suggested, that she is the leader, she denies it and prompts said person to never suggest such a thing again. Many come to her, even children, pleading her to officially join the resistance; to unite the people fighting the good fight as they sometimes disagree and get in each other’s way. But, Julia is not one of violence, the more violence she knows the weaker she gets until the point of becoming sick.

[ElRey]

Okay my character is updated and ready to be added to the list.

[tefruit]

The final edits to Inez have been made and Casio has been added to her history.

[Wing Chun]

Alright then, all character applications have been edited, revised, and accepted. I will begin writing the first in-character post, along with some basic posting rules. Solas can join us at his leisure when his character is ready.

[5Solas]

Thank you and I apologize for the lateness...look forward to joining soon!

[Semi Sentience]

Gaspard Noah Lemaître

Birth:

Born in Marseille, France in March of 2097.

Nationality:

French

Gender:

Male

Age:

Twenty-seven

Race:

Caucasian

Height & Weight

5"9' & 156 lbs.

Ability:

To say that life dances to the beat of the same drum is not only poetically appealing, it's also incorrect. Some life dance with a little more fervor than others; some life believe their dance is a partiality of some supernature and not just a calisthenic approach to existing; and yet some life don't have the dance in them at all. It is far more accurate to think of life as a collection of light-bulbs; myriad in design and limited in function, though all dependent on one source of energy: electricity. No longer are we playing with metaphors, we have entered life in its literal sense. All forms of life function in different capacities with the aide of electricity. Maybe not the kind that rips through a black sky, sending animals and children into terrible fits of uncontrollable fear; but just as beautiful and with a little more significance.

Bioelectricty prompts the onset of chemical reactions that course through our body like a network of messages, relaying information where it is needed to perform tasks that the brain has deemed necessary. It's the juice behind the execution of our muscular and skeletal system, a source of power to the wonder that is our cognitive beings. You feel it in your body, even from others went it permeates through the skin in the form of thermal energy; you see it all around you, or rather all is seen through it; you can hear it too, but not as the zzzzzzzz you might think of it as, but as the sound of birds chirping, babies crying, or the soft, delicate pleasure being whispered into your ear by a loved one. Unbelievable yes, but you know of its existence without even being conscious of it. But one man possesses a far more intimate understanding of this language, not only can he speak it fluently, but he knows it well enough to create the words on his own. This man is Gaspard Lemaitre.

The currents of electricity that course our body do not exist as the messages themselves, rather they are prompted by and prompt the chemical reactions that facilitate communication throughout our body. When a plate of food is set before you, your brain doesn't simply zap its commands into the respective muscles of your body to initiate a reaction; synapses in your brain fire off at unbelievable speeds, turning thoughts into electrical currents that interact with action potentials all throughout your body's cellular construct to prompt the body into acting based upon that thought. Gaspard has the ability to read these currents as if they were nothing more than letters in a very abstract language and perceive the message behind them, tracing the chemical patterns throughout your body to their origins in your brain. He can sense when the average person first recognized that the plate of food was before them, when exactly they felt prompted to eat it, how the plate of food was recorded by their own senses, how it tasted, and what effect it had on their body.

The manner in which synapses fire is universal true, but when they do and what prompts them to is never constant. Each individual has a unique bioelectrical current that courses their body, each uniquely resistant or pliant to the whims of his own electricity. The consequence of this as he has come to discover is that while he may be able to induce slight manipulations to the direction of the current, he cannot stop one entirely nor can he create one within another person as well. For instance, he couldn't prompt an individual to commit an action without themselves already providing the chemical components to do so, meaning if they didn't want to do something, he couldn't force them to. Alternatively, if that person were to, say, commit themselves to kicking a ball, Gaspard could manipulate the current prompting their body to do so resulting in them either kicking at the ball seconds before or after they were supposed to or swinging their foot degrees shy of the actual ball itself. The average person remains largely unaware of his influence on them, but should their own current prove strong enough, it is possible for an individual to feel a sense of discomfort or invasion from his antics.

The brain requires chemical resources to carry out its actions and if they are absent the reaction cannot be induced. If their exists the components and will for an individual to change their mood, Gaspard can facilitate the directional transition of electricity in their body to do so, but if someone were to have a medical condition that prohibited the production of say dopamine, he'd have nothing to prompt the person to feel the sensations of satisfaction. Another restriction that he has encountered is his inability to access the memories of other individuals; at one point in time he could, though after a schizophrenic episode that resulted in him confined in psychiatric care, he willingly constructed a psychological obstruction, impassable, to prevent that from ever occurring. That is also the cause of the birth of Argent, perhaps his most sadistic and antagonistic persona.

Biography

The Lemaitre name is one that holds a substantial tonnage behind it, not only in France, but Europe as well. Gaspard's great-grandfather, Theodore, founded the company that would one day grow to be one of Europe's largest import-export companies. Both his grandfather and father spent the duration of their lives expanding their business to lengths that knew no parameters; finding firm niches in many facets of society including arms-dealing, food and drug standards, as well as some fruitful pharmaceutical exploits. Needless to say, Gaspard was born into an economical and social strata of supreme affluence, being afforded nearly every one luxury he could possibly wrap his head around and prove worthy of. His parents themselves weren't products of the new-age money they had come to acquire and still fostered the "work-hard, earn much" mentality customary of those individuals occupying the generations before his time. In fact it had been this aspect of his father, along with him serving in the military, that had helped in keeping Gaspard grounded to what actually was worth the value placed on it. Things such as charity, morality, patience and those other traits of human nature that existed bereft of a price-tag were not entirely lost on the boy and in this way he resembled his father as he grew up.

Gifted with a precocity for knowledge and the inheritance of his father's business acumen, Gaspard exceeded particularly well throughout his schooling, graduating much before his peers and being the youngest in his university classes by a good five years. He majored in business and psychology, oddly enough, and took up work for his uncle who had come to own the family business when his father passed away at the age of sixteen. Suspicions of foul play arose some time after his father's death, but the degraded relationship with his mother following a fallout he had with her and the fact that he was interning in California when it occurred prevented him from conducting his own investigation. Not only that, but it was during this time as well, that he exposed himself to the consequences' severity of his abilities, resulting in a brief detainment in a psychiatric ward in northern California. Of course, such a thing was paid to remain confined in discretion, and other than the staff at the ward, no one else was privy to Gaspard's fragmented self. Upon his return from his studies abroad, he found that the dynamic of the family business had changed much to his own and what he could only imagine would be his father's disapproval. However much he might have disagreed would never be known to anyone, for he masked it quite expertly and conducted himself in the favor of his uncle, quickly earning a coveted position under his tutelage. It wasn't until some time after he had invested much of himself into company and in a rather fortuitous manner that he discovered the truth behind his father's death.

Upon conversing with his uncle of the logistics of exploring potentially profitable possibilities in their American sectors, it became strikingly, and suddenly (it should be noted) perspicuous that his uncle, had been responsible for his father's death. He wasn't quite sure how, nor to what extent, his uncle had gone to see his father die, but the motive behind it was as apparent as ever. The feeling was ineffable and seemed to arise every time he found himself before his uncle; it took a matter of months for Gaspard to finally come to terms with what his premonition was suggesting, but he did. Without the evidence to support such knowledge, he had no room to act on such a claim, nor could he afford for himself or his mother, to make such an unbased accusation. Disgusted nonetheless, Gaspard chose to conduct a little experiment of his own.

He didn't mean to kill his uncle. Despite what might seem just and appropriate, Gaspard wasn't the vengeful sort, or at least he didn't feel such. Sure, he wanted justice for his father's death as much as his mother did, but to extend himself as a murderer to see it was beyond his nature. It started out slight, he recalled speaking with his uncle just for the sake of conversation. Poking his brain, seeing if he could somehow worm his way into his subconsciousness, but after that little episode that saw him in the psychiatric ward, he found it particularly challenging just discovering what the man had to eat that morning for breakfast. He simply wasn't able to do it. But then he recalled something his uncle had mentioned previously, something about his wife contemplating separation and the notion that any divorce settlement would be substantial in the manner of alimony. It was a superficial and rather trivial thing to exploit, but Gaspard committed himself to it. He tinkered around with the thought inside his uncle's head, adding to it much more substantiality than was due, increasing his uncle's own anxiety of the matter. Slowly but surely he found his way beyond the initial electrical current that usually served to block him out, and beyond it was a trove of insecurities, ideas of inadequacies and feelings of incompetence caused by his wife who had apparently been cheating on him as well. Who would've thought?

All these things, by themselves, and even together, were fairly mild mental discomforts; things people could usually block out or remedy by committing themselves to other pursuits in life. Though with Gaspard's promptings, their magnitude grew exponentially, until one morning a couple months later, Gaspard was woken with news that his uncle and a certain amount of his brainmatter, were found in the bedroom of his estate. Apparently, the toll of all that was troubling him, and Gaspard acting not only as an augmentor, but a catalyst as well, would prove too much to bear for his uncle. As per his father's will, the next in line would be Gaspard to inherit the business; but for some rather odd reason Gaspard wasn't comfortable with this. Upon hearing the news of his uncle's sudden death the plague of nightmares and odd dreams returned to him, followed by Argent. He decided it was best to hand over his inheritances to his mother for the time being, and instead took a much more interesting route for his life...

Predominant Feature:

Gaspard's most noticeable trait (noticeable in the sense that it's unusual not so much that it bespeaks of anything underlying or not) is a psychological kink in the use of his power. Due to the peculiar nature in which he manipulates his ability, Gaspard is physically incapable of looking another person in their eyes. With force and some manner of fastening his head in once place, you might be able to catch his glance, but of his own accord he cannot, in fact, he'll take every measure short of blinding himself to ensure that he never looks someone in the eye. To his knowledge, it is not known why or how this oddity was born, but somehow in the employment of his powers he realized that certain psychological fail-safes were constructed by his psyche to ensure that he himself was never compromised by his own ability.

Despite what may be expected, it isn't all that difficult a thing to manage and mostly it goes unnoticed. A large majority of the time, Gaspard wears black-lens glasses to mask the fact that he must override a social courtesy to ensure his sanity, but if you can get over the fact of him wearing sunglasses in a dimly lit room, than open conversation is perfectly manageable.

Health:

Physically speaking, Gaspard is as fit as a fiddle. Other than the common cold or the flu should it catch him before he's time to vaccinate himself, Gaspard lives a life free of crippling afflictions. Mentally, however, a couple screws are unwound; and in some realms of his psyche completely missing. He wasn't always as perceptive of his abilities nor the consequences that accompany them; and in way of his psyche he's taken a couple blows because of it. Clinically speaking, one observer might write him down for slight schizotypal personality disorder, capitalizing on his odd way of viewing normal situations and rather eccentric disposition which he cognitively tries to bind.

Another oddity that has come to surface in his recent experiments with his abilities, is the birth of multiple personas. As of late, the onset of these personalities has been mild as has been his employment of his abilities, leading him to believe that the use of his powers is associated with the mental discomforts he experiences. He reasons that should he use his abilities prolifically, he'd no doubt slip into insanity without indication, or worse yet, lose the function of his mental faculties altogether. He himself does not act on these personalities, more like, his thinking is swayed by their existence. It should also be noted that the only personalities he experiences, are those already crafted in some of the fictional novels he reads...and it should also be noted that he has read a great many novels.

Not exactly sure if this character is up to the task of impressing you, but I figured I'd try my luck seeing as how playing the part of a paranormal within this setting is extremely exciting. I'm not sure exactly how I'll orchestrate the use of his powers, but I have my own personal limitations, as well as creative intentions when I do decide to use them. There's a reason why his abilities are tied in with his psychosis and I wanted that to come to light within this story; he's not just some paranormal with an uninhibited superpower, he's a man living with a cumbersome burden. Even still, if he doesn't sit well with you, I can excise the bits about him being a paranormal and play him out like a normal individual. Your feedback would be awesome, thanks!

[Zephyr116]

Hey, new guy...

The CS is nice and all, but maybe you should read through the OOC and look at exactly what Wing wants. The CS template is not correct and it was specifically stated that Augs and Paranormals are no-touchy without permission. And paranormals' abilities are not make-up-your-own, to my knowledge.

So, be prepared for a swift kick in the arse (or not; I don't know the GM that well).

[Semi Sentience]

Hey, new guy...

The CS is nice and all, but maybe you should read through the OOC and look at exactly what Wing wants. The CS template is not correct and it was specifically stated that Augs and Paranormals are no-touchy without permission. And paranormals' abilities are not make-up-your-own, to my knowledge.

So, be prepared for a swift kick in the arse (or not; I don't know the GM that well).

I probably should thank you for your input as obviously constructive as it was, it just seems as though you didn't really read through my character sheet, or that maybe you're being a bit more presumptuous than you have the ability to. And I don't mean that condescendingly at all, of course. I read through the introductory post two times prior to brainstorming that character and once more just minutes ago after reading your response; with that in mind I can't seem to find what exactly your're basing your assertions off of. It was never explicitly stated that the format provided was the format we were meant to adhere to and seeing as how all of the information she requested has been addressed by my format, I don't really see where the conflict arises. The information is just as accessible in both formats, which is why I'm confused as to why you find it problematic. Secondly, if you read the opening post once more, you'll realize that it was not stated, specifically, that paranormals were off-limits; Wing just informed us that the chances of us actually successfully being able to write as one were unlikely, though should we be able to impress her, she would allow us. This is merely my attempt at impressing her, excuse me if I seem too ambitious. Lastly, the power that I am proposing with this character is telepathy; it might not be as direct as you would like but its exactly as she described it. As a writer I enjoy the technical side of supernature and as such took the liberty of attempting to describe telepathy in a very science-fiction-esque manner.

Trust me, I'm sure my work isn't exactly what Wing had in mind and rejection is a very likely and expected outcome, and while your feedback is appreciated, I think in this case it was a little prematurely developed. Thank you though, just be there for me when she kicks my arse